The Penn Libraries is proud to announce that the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts will receive a 2016 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) Katharine Kyes Leab and Daniel J. Leab “American Book Prices Current” Exhibition Award for the 2015 exhibition catalog, “The Image Affair: Dreyfus in the Media, 1894-1906.”

Photo of “The Image Affair” catalog

This full-color, illustrated catalog, examines a student-curated exhibition of ephemera related to the infamous wrongful conviction for treason, and eventual exoneration, of Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus as it played out in the French media at the turn of the last century. Encompassing the full range of the pe
riod’s print culture including the illustrated press, broadsheets, photography, postcards, films, and even board games, the exhibition drew its content from Penn Libraries’ Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair, one of the largest such collections in the world. Expanded essays on each section of the exhibition by the students of University of Pennsylvania Art History Professor Andre Dombrowski’s, “The Image Affair: Dreyfus in the Media, 1894-1906” class provide rich scholarly context.

The symbiotic partnership between Dombroski’s class and Kislak Center designers and curators produced the elements that garnered the most praise from the Leab Awards committee. David Faulds, Chair of the RBMS Exhibitions Awards Committee, stated that he was impressed by the “innovative approach to an historical event by examining it through the visual culture that surrounded it, the subtle, but beautiful and unifying graphic design elements, and the significance of the fact that such an excellent catalog was the result of a student-curated exhibition.”

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About the Penn Libraries
The Penn Libraries serve the world-class faculty and students of Penn’s 12 schools. The Libraries’ collections comprise more than 7 million volumes, over 100,000 journals, some 2 million digitized images, and extraordinary rare and unique materials that document the intellectual and cultural experience of ancient and modern civilizations. Through our collaborative relationships, we supplement Penn’s great local collections with physical access to the Center for Research Libraries (approximately 5 million items), the combined holdings of the Ivies (more than 70 million volumes), and exclusive electronic access to some 2 million public domain titles in the HathiTrust. Today, the Libraries play an instrumental role in developing new technologies for information discovery and dissemination and are noted for groundbreaking work in digital library design. To learn more about the Penn Libraries, visit http://www.library.upenn.edu.